This special meeting, held at 2:00 PM in the School District Board Room, focused on two primary agenda items: (1) a referral to the City Manager to prepare impartial reports on two voter-initiated ordinances (Control of Infectious Aerosols in City Buildings and Large Buildings Fossil Fuel Emissions Tax), and (2) review of community survey results and direction on potential November 2024 ballot measures, including the Parks Tax, Measure P (real property transfer tax), Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Product Distribution Tax, and a potential new arts funding measure. Council also discussed the feasibility of an additional survey on arts revenue options.
So honestly, just to say it if if the it's the city manager's report comes back and says, well, there's this cost and this cost and so forth. Uh and by the way, this um was funded in tens of millions of dollars by um uh by ARPA. I mean, that money was for this exact purpose. Whether it's been used for this purpose, I don't know, but that's what it was for. Um that's what's intended for, and we have information that, for example, there are filtering machines, air filtering machines uh in city buildings that aren't functioning because of a lack of a filter. Like not the not the whole box, the little filter for years. Um this is if this is true, this is malpractice and it can have a deadly result. Um please um let's make this happen. Um, and and and and ask for a fulsome report that really gets to both potential costs and avoided costs, personal costs, avoiding lack of no uh uh uh attendance at work, um, and uh uh the social costs and the and the um public health costs, all of it. Um and then we'll talk more about the uh thank you the climate measure rate. Thank you. Okay, uh, are there any other members of the public here in person who'd like to address item one on the consent calendar? Uh okay, we'll go to speakers on Zoom. Chuck Soper followed by Moni Law. Hello. Uh my name is Chuck Soper. I'm speaking in support of the control of infectious aerosols in city buildings ordinance. I'd like to play two short recordings from an article titled Post Pandemic and Increasing Focus on Indoor Air Quality. So Joe Allen of Harvard's TH Chan School of Public Health believes the rapid spread of COVID in early 2020 was preventable. Think about the public health gains we've made over the past hundred years. We made improvements to water quality, outdoor air pollution, or food safety. We've made improvements to sanitation, absolute basics of public health. Where has indoor air been in that conversation? It's totally forgotten about. And the pandemic showed what a glaring mistake that was. What do you think was lost because of that lag and understanding of how this was spread? Tens of thousands of lives in the US, many more globally. Not exaggeration. And the next very short recording is about the misconception that old buildings cannot be healthy buildings. Some of these fixes don't take much. Improving the level of filtration. That's easy, it's cheap, protects against COVID-19 influenza, also protects against wildfire smoke and outdoor air pollution, protects against allergens, simple, absolute basic things that can do. For the past two years, I've been recovering from long COVID. For me, the ordinance is personal. I care about the health and well-being of my coworkers as well as the community. I urge the count council to support this ordinance. I believe it will pay for itself. Thank you. Thank you. We'll go next to Moni Law, followed by Brianna McGuire. And Moni, you should be able to speak now. I think thank you, Mayor and Council. I hope you can hear me. I'm on my personal time, speaking in my personal capacity on vacation right now on a bus. Um, I do believe this urgency of this matter cannot be understated or overstated, actually overstated in that we all know that the climate is warming beyond the time that they'd expect. Moni, we lost you. Uh Ms. Law, we lost your connection. Okay, we'll come back to you. We'll go next to Brianna and hopefully we'll be able to connect with you.